Profanity habits: Twitter style

5 days ago Download Squad posted a great article, "17 ways to visualize Twitter and its Tweets", which outlined some great sites for looking at various Twitter statistics.

One of the sites mentioned was TweetVolume.com where you can enter up to five keywords and see how they stack up against each other on the Twitter network.

I played around with keyword groupings like "Obama vs Clinton vs McCain" (Obama has over double the tweets of Clinton and McCain combined) and "PC vs MAC" (Mac has over triple the tweets of PC) but then an odd one struck me. How much profanity is used on Twitter?

So I decided to pit 5 of the big bad words head to head and see where the chips fell. My money was on "sh**" for sure, and I was completely surprised when "damn" took the prize.

Results:
Damn - 35,100
Sh** - 20,100
Ass - 19,200
F*** - 15,300
Bi*** - 6,380

In hindsight I should have known "damn" would be the most widely used profane word simply based on my own Twitter habits. Out of these 5 words "damn" is the only one I have ever used in a tweet (to the best of my knowledge).

Twitter feels like shouting in a public place to me, as you never know who will come across your messages. With that in mind, I try to keep my language civil. I'm sure many Twitter users feel something similar, and based on that conjecture I should have guessed "damn" would be the overwhelming favorite.

Damn.